Jesus' family tomb is one of the more sensational 'discoveries' of recent years, but is it true? Media interest in ancient discoveries is forcing the slow and painstaking discipline of archaeology into a swift and swashbuckling sport according to Egyptologist Dr Karin Sowada. In contrast, 25 years of digging and reconstructing a site at the Dead Sea in Jordan, under the direction of Konstantinos Politis, has yielded one of the most striking ancient churches, the Sanctuary of Lot's Cave.

Archaeologists sometimes find themselves under attack, says Karin Sowada, by critics who want to 'de-couple' the discipline from the Bible, one of the earliest sources of Middle East history. But the Sanctuary of Lot's Cave, uncovered by Konstantinos Politis, demonstrates that the ancients were equally interested in finding signs of their religious history in the sands of the desert.

Transcript

[Music: Raiders of the Lost Ark theme]

Rachael Kohn: Raiders of the Lost Ark was one of the biggest Hollywood successes. The 1981 movie is not only in the top 20 highest grossing films ever, but it spawned a prequel and two sequels. Who knew? Archaeology is hot!

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn. This is The Spirit of Things on RN, on air and online at abc.net.au/radionational.

So if archaeology mints money at the box office, why is the academic discipline struggling for funds in the university? That may be changing as archaeologists are getting media savvy. But is it a blessing or a curse?

In Sydney, Macquarie University's Society for the Study of Early Christianity within the Ancient Cultures Research Centre recently put on a symposium on Archaeology, the Bible and Early Christianity. My guests today illuminate two sides of the coin. Konstantinos Politis is an archaeologist working in Jordan on a magnificent Christian site, called the Sanctuary of Lot's Cave. And Karin Sowada, an Egyptologist teaching in Sydney, addresses the whole question of archaeology's relationship to the media.

Karin Sowada, welcome to The Spirit of Things.

Karin Sowada: Thank you.

Rachael Kohn: It's good to be talking to someone about Christian archaeology, because the archaeology that we've been hearing about in the media has swirled around the time of Jesus' life and death, and there's been some controversy around it. Is the media really beginning to run the field of archaeology? Is it imposing itself so much that it's actually determining what we're finding?

Karin Sowada: I think that the advent of the 24-hour media cycle across every aspect of the media, be it the internet or cable television, Twitter, Facebook, has changed reporting dramatically across a range of fields, including politics. We've seen that very strongly in the political realm, but I think it is also having an impact on archaeology because particularly the cable television networks have this enormous demand for media content, be it Discovery Channel or History Channel, National Geographic Channel, they need to fill their airtime. And so the kind of discoveries that are being made and indeed I think the kind of discoveries that are being manufactured are very much feeding into this demand for content that we've seen over the last couple of years.

So we're at a point now where we have these major television discoveries, some of which aren't really discoveries at all, some of which were made some years ago but are being reinterpreted through new eyes by non-scholars who see an opportunity to make a name for themselves, sell a book, generate an exhibition, whatever. So it is changing the landscape.

Rachael Kohn: One example that comes to mind is the discovery of the Talpiot Tomb, as it's called, the tomb of Jesus or his family in Jerusalem in the region of Talpiot.

Karin Sowada: That's correct. In 2007 a documentary was produced by James Cameron, of Avatar and Titanic fame, reporting on a tomb that was actually discovered 30 years ago by Israeli archaeologists and it was reported in the scholarly literature, so it's not a new discovery, but its contents were reinterpreted by James Cameron and his colleagues based on existing material. But they interpreted the names on some of the objects found in the tomb as representing Jesus and his family. And a whole narrative was constructed around this discovery, which was quite sensational when it was released because of course they were claiming that this was evidence of the historical Jesus.

But they went further than the evidence and claimed that Jesus had a wife and here was his brothers and his mother and so forth, which of course we know from the New Testament, but they were also claiming there were bones in the box, which of course contradicts the historical account of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. So this was enormously controversial at the time, and of course they followed up this year with another documentary of a tomb from the same region which they claimed had evidence of early Christian burial in the form of incisions and decorations on the coffins, which suggested a belief in the resurrection.

Rachael Kohn: Was that the Jonah ossuary?

Karin Sowada: That's right, it is known as the Jonah ossuary, and interestingly these discoveries...although made many years ago, were reinvestigated by this team using a robotic camera that was sent down through a hole drilled in the patio of an apartment block. So these were not objects that people had actually personally handled, they'd only seen them by way of these robotic cameras. And so conclusions were made based on photographs that one of these ossuaries, one of these boxes containing bones, bore an incised picture of a man emerging from a fish which they then interpreted as an image of Jonah emerging from the whale, which of course, as we know from the New Testament, Jesus himself points to as a sign of his resurrection. So, quite startling conclusions.

I think in the end the content...there was a bit of a disconnect between the content and the name of the documentary which was The Jesus Discovery when fact there was nothing to do with Jesus found in the tomb. But again I think this speaks to the kind of hype and sensationalism that is often accompanying such made-for-television discoveries.

Rachael Kohn: Highly suggestive certainly. Not long ago for Easter in fact I spoke to Israel Knohl, a Hebrew University scholar, who specialises in the belief in the Messiah, and he talked about the Gabriel Revelation or the Jesselson Stone, another inscription from the 1st century that talks about or refers to dying and resurrection. Again, something that he associated with popular beliefs at that time.

Karin Sowada: I have no quarrel with a scholar who has done his or her homework, looked at the material, done the hard yards and is moving towards publishing their material in a peer-reviewed source. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. And sure, belief in the resurrection we know from the New Testament, from the establishment of the early Church, is the fundamental basis of Christianity. Without the resurrection you basically don't have a Christian faith.

But to make a conclusion on the basis of an object that has been observed by a remote camera and then to claim that we have an early Christian burial, I think this really speaks into how these discoveries are being hyped, they're made for television, they are very sensational in their promotion. And in the end there's no opportunity to peer review or challenge or comment on the interpretation because these discoveries are fuelled by different sources, they're not fuelled by scholars and institutions, they're fuelled by people with money who have an opportunity to access this material and basically completely bypass the standard channels of peer-reviewed institutional scholarship.

Rachael Kohn: Aren't there some scholars associated with the Tapiot Tomb discovery? I'm thinking of James Tabor who is the chair of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina. I think he had something called the Jesus Project which lists quite a number of illustrious scholars associated with the project. I don't know how directly they're associated with the Talpiot Tomb discovery. But obviously there are some scholars who got involved in this.

Karin Sowada: Yes, there are some scholars and they've got involved for various reasons. I don't know the scholars personally. And again, that's fine. If these conclusions are going to be made, it's great that scholars are involved and can actually assess the material seriously, publish their results and we can all debate them. But scholarship takes time. It is not something you can do on the back of a six-month filming schedule which is very tight, invariably producers and television channels want to see the results proclaimed on the film straight away without any reflection.

Certainly my experience of having been involved in a television documentary is that the producers were constantly wanting me to make the discoveries to camera without an opportunity to sit back and reflect on that. And you certainly see that in the way these documentaries are filmed; often conclusions are made to camera without the benefit of having really sat down and thought about the evidence. I've seen some of these documentaries and I was quite surprised at the speed with which these leaps of logic were made from a comment a scholar might make into a final conclusion that, you know, something might belong to Mary Magdalene, where in fact the translation of the name is not quite as straightforward.

So these leaps of logic are made very quickly, not necessarily by the scholars but by those involved, supported by very good vision, filming of this very high-tech excavation, if one can call it that, combined with these very emotive reconstructions of what things might have looked like in the 1st century, of Mary burying her son and of people at the foot of the cross and so forth.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, those dramatisations that one sees interspersed throughout so-called scholarly documentaries.

Karin Sowada: Indeed, and this has actually become a stock standard element of the documentary in many different fields, not just the field of archaeology and the Bible, I've seen it in Egyptian archaeology as well where there is the pharaoh with his crown at the head of his armies, chasing the enemy into the desert. They must be very expensive to produce I think.

Rachael Kohn: What you're describing there is really a transition or shift into entertainment. Are scholars being taken over really by the whole entertainment industry?

Karin Sowada: I think there is a danger of that, and I think what we're seeing with some of these made-for-television research projects is that they are funded by private sources, they bypass traditional channels of peer-reviewed institutional funding, and as a result the documentary maker and the producers access their audience directly. And of course scholars who are at work on their archaeological material find it very difficult to engage with this sort of stuff because they need time to come to the conclusions. Archaeology is not something you can do in five days, it can take years to actually reach a conclusion. And so this is a very big disconnect between the reality of what happens in the purview of a university and in the field with a made-for-TV documentary. There's a very big disconnect there.

Rachael Kohn: But it is happening, which points to some pressures obviously, perhaps financial ones, or is it also professional ones? That is, universities increasingly demanding their academics get media attention, and also to bring in money, perhaps partnerships with TV stations.

Karin Sowada: I think the first comment I'd make is never get between a cable TV station and a bucket of money. So if a proposal is pitched to a station or a network which is going to generate advertising dollars, be controversial, have good talent, good vision and a great story, it doesn't really matter who is promoting it, they will give it a serious look and it may end up being screened.

I do think that academics find the medium very challenging because they are under enormous pressure with teaching loads, research loads, their university key performance indicators are based on research output in scholarly journals and books. And so the TV documentary is something that I think they need to engage in or at least basic immediate engagement over their discoveries is something they should do, but it's an additional burden on the already overworked academics. So I think they find it very challenging.

Announcer: A team of historians and filmmakers went way below the surface where they found ossuaries or ancient bone burial boxes they say point to proof of Jesus' earliest followers.

Rachael Kohn: One of the latest discoveries from the same people who uncovered (again) the so-called tomb of Jesus in Talpiot, Jerusalem. You're listening to The Spirit of Things on RN, at abc.net.au/radionational. I'm speaking to Sydney based archaeologist Karin Sowada:

So this means the ideal candidate to make a documentary on, say, the Jesus tomb, is the independent scholar or the quasi-scholar, the person who is not affiliated with the university, does have some access to funds, and can traipse around the desert pointing to inscriptions saying, 'And look, we have here Jesus' tomb.'

Karin Sowada: I think certainly it's important that working academics in teaching jobs and research jobs are given some kind of credit for this sort of work because on the one hand the television documentary and the media generally is the way in which the public receives its information about research results and about archaeology. In fact I would argue that the one-hour television documentary is the gold standard for how people receive their information. So whether an academic likes it or not, they need to be out there in some form with their discoveries, either on the radio or in popular magazines. I think academics do need to engage much more vigorously with the media with their own discoveries.

In addition to that I think that the sorts of things that we've been discussing about the Talpiot Tomb also need greater engagement from the scholarly community. We saw that in the United States when these documentaries came out, there were a considerable number of scholars who did actually get on television, there were panel discussions, there was a lot of blogging, there was a lot of commentary in the newspaper. This was a huge issue in the United States. And the scholarly community, to its credit, did really step forward and engage very strongly with this.

I guess being in Australia we don't see that, we just see the documentary, we don't see the debate that surrounds it. Perhaps Australians are a bit more sceptical about the kind of overblown discoveries that might be announced in the United States. We're a little bit more reflective, we're a lot more secular in our outlook as a community, and so we might take these things as a community with a grain of salt. But that doesn't exonerate our own academic community from likewise engaging locally with these issues because certainly in faith communities, be they Jewish communities or Christian communities, these are very, very live issues. It is real water-cooler stuff for people in synagogues and churches, and it's very important I think for them to hear, you know, what the local take is. What do our local rabbis or priests or academic specialists think about this stuff? Is it for real? That's the question I'm always asked; is this stuff for real, what do I think?

Rachael Kohn: Especially as these documentaries tend to get shown at Easter or Christmas when the focus is very much on the faith. But it does also point to a degree of hunger out there for these kinds of discoveries, perhaps in an environment where people are saying don't preach at me, in fact I don't even go to church, but show me the evidence and maybe I'll consider it.

Karin Sowada: I think that's right, although public interest in archaeology has a very, very long history, and as we've seen from...if you look back to the time of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, that generated a huge amount of media interest. It still does even today. You put King Tut on something and it will rate its socks off. But even then in the 1920s, the Times negotiated an exclusive deal with Lord Carnarvon, who was the financial backer of the expedition, for exclusive rights to all the news from the find. It made worldwide headlines. Carnarvon and Howard Carter became celebrities.

It was enormous, and that wasn't even anything biblical, this was obviously the most important discovery of the 20th century, but still, even today there is enormous interest in the past, the people of the past, how people lived. Obviously the intersection of archaeology with faith has an enormous body of interest for all the reasons that you've just outlined, of some people wanting proof, some wanting confirmations, some people I guess wanting reassurance that what they believe in has a historical foundation. So there are all sorts of reasons, but the fascination with the past I think transcends regions and generations.

Rachael Kohn: All of those names you've mentioned are male, and one thinks of Arthur Evans in the 19th century and his discovery of the palace at Knossos. One gets the impression that the adventure associated with archaeology is almost a male preoccupation. I wonder though whether that's really the true story. Was it entirely a male endeavour?

Karin Sowada: Not at all. There have been many women in archaeology over the decades, some very famous, Kathleen Kenyon of course, the excavator of Jericho, a very well-known example, but many others, and indeed even today there are lots of women working in the field. But as I was thinking through this issue it did strike me that the self-promoters tend to be male, the ones that we know best are men, and particularly surrounding these recent documentaries on the Talpiot Tomb, again there are no women involved in this expedition at all, and that struck me as very, very interesting. I wondered why that was so. I don't necessarily have the answer, but perhaps it's got to do with risk-taking. There's not so much scholarship, there's a lot of speculation and not so much scholarship involved in this stuff, but I wondered whether it had something to do with risk-taking behaviour. There's probably a sociological study in that somewhere.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, I think it's also the Indiana Jones syndrome. Producers think that a swashbuckling archaeologist is perhaps more attractive than the studious and serious woman digging around in the dust getting herself all dirty. I want to ask you how you got interested in archaeology.

Karin Sowada: I had always been interested in archaeology as a child, and many years ago in my early 20s I had an opportunity to visit Pompeii, and that really fired up my imagination. It was one of the most fantastic sites and it still is, it's an amazing site, and it stuck in my mind very much at the time. And I also saw the Indiana Jones film, it was released around the same time as well, and I suddenly realised that I could study archaeology here in Sydney.

And so I went to the University of Sydney and took degrees in classical and near Eastern archaeology and Egyptian archaeology, and I ended up actually having a career as a field archaeologist. I worked at the Nicholson Museum at Sydney University for nearly 10 years and actually ended up finding that one can find a job in that field. And I find it endlessly fascinating. I'm still an active field archaeologist, and actively engaged in scholarly research.

Rachael Kohn: So, the media did have an impact on you and a positive one. But tell me about the negative experience you've had, because you already alluded to it, having worked on a documentary and the pressures of that. Just exactly what was it like?

Karin Sowada: I was engaged in a pre-existing research project at the University of Sydney, and I was called out of the blue by some documentary producers who were interested in doing a television program about my research. Within a very short space of time negotiations took place within the university, a filming schedule was drawn up. We were still really at the very beginning of our research project, we'd only been going about a year, our results were still pretty tentative, and yet deadlines were set, filming schedules set up, scripts written. We did a three-week film shoot overseas in Egypt and the UK.

I was always being asked what result could I announce, what conclusion was I going to draw from this or that. And with the cameras running there was a lot of pressure on me to actually come up with discoveries on camera, which I was a bit uncomfortable in doing because I need time to think through these things, to look at my material, to examine my results, and it did make me uncomfortable but I was constantly being asked to come to some sorts of conclusions.

And I realised in hindsight that actually that was part of the process, that not only were they telling the story of my research but actually they were telling my story of my engagement with my own research, how did I feel about what I was seeing, what did it make me think, what connection did I have with the past. That really surprised me, that I was the story as much as my own research, so my reactions were very important.

I think in hindsight I would have done things a bit differently now with the benefit of more experience in handling the press, but it did drive the narrative. We had to tell a story in one hour, and I think that's the big danger with a lot of this stuff. It's not to be avoided I think, but the compulsion, the need to tell the story does drive the outcome and does speed the process up I think much faster than traditional scholarship.

Rachael Kohn: But maybe archaeologists need a bit of a push, given that the 350th monograph on terracotta shards from Mesopotamia can be a little bit tedious and may make some people question the real value of this, who's going to benefit from it. So there must be a real desire on the part of people almost to make archaeology less arcane and more accountable.

Karin Sowada: Look, I think that's right. And in an era when university research is funded out of taxpayers' dollars, I think taxpayers absolutely have a right to know where their money is going and to hear the results of those expenditures. And so we do need to get out a bit more, explain what is happening, publish our material much more quickly than we do. It is a danger, particularly for archaeologists, to sit on a lot of material. You know, it takes six weeks to run an excavation but it can take years and years to publish the results, and that's completely unacceptable.

Some countries nowadays actually insist that before an excavation permit can be renewed, one must have actually published the volume of your previous season's excavations, and I think you need that kind of push, that sort of deadline in order to get your material out. So yes, I think you're right, it is a big danger to just sit on results, say nothing, publish at a glacial pace and think you're ticking all the boxes as far as universities are concerned. Well, that may be the case but as far as the public is concerned, it lacks relevance, it stays too hidden, and there's a story to be told.

Rachael Kohn: There is indeed. And, Karin, I want to ask you finally, let's get back to faith and Christian archaeology in particular, and first of all, how is it going? Does it remain a popular and vigorous field? And secondly, is it driven by a desire to debunk or to confirm?

Karin Sowada: Well, I think archaeology will just continue to move at the glacial pace that it does, quite frankly. There will of course remain great interest in the intersection of faith issues with archaeology. Archaeologists themselves are often interested in these questions, and indeed particularly in Israel and in North America these are very, very live academic debates, about when the Israelites appeared in Israel, the conquest as per the Bible, can we see that on the ground, the existence of David and Solomon and the extent of their kingdom. I mean, these are very, very live issues in the scholarly and the popular literature. So my view is that archaeology is a relatively young discipline, it's only really been going for 120 years as a scientific discipline, so we're still really at the very beginning of what we understand about these things and about human society in general.

Rachael Kohn: Well, today people can actually go on the internet and see videos of what it looks like under the patio in Talpiot in Jerusalem. Do you think that kind of access will actually generate a lot more archaeology?

Karin Sowada: There is plenty to be found, there's no doubt about it. Finds like the Talpiot Tomb were discovered simply through construction works. What I think continues to be of interest to the public is whether there are proofs for the biblical narrative. This has been of interest to communities since the 19th century when inscriptions from Mesopotamia and Babylon started to emerge that actually helped underpin historical aspects of the biblical narrative. People are intensely interested in this.

Some sections of the scholarly community work hard to decouple the Bible from archaeology, and I think scientifically that is the right way to go. We have to let archaeology stand on its own terms, look at it objectively, apply correct methodologies, scientific methods of analysis. There can be a number of interpretations that could all equally be right around a given set of information from an archaeological site, but the intersection of archaeology will always be of interest, has been of interest for many generations and will continue to be so. But what I think people need to do is to be a bit discerning about this stuff. I would encourage media outlets to be a little bit more questioning as well because often I think the media can take a lot of this at face value and harder questions I think need to be asked about all of us involved in archaeology.

Rachael Kohn: Still a very, very exciting field and you're lucky to be a part of it. Karin Sowada, it's been great talking to you, thank you so much for being on The Spirit of Things.

Karin Sowada: Thanks Rachael.

Rachael Kohn: Karin Sowada teaches Archaeology and the Bible at Mary Andrew College in the Anglican diocese of Sydney and is also a researcher in Egyptology at Macquarie University.

If you put The Spirit of Things in your search engine or just go to the RN website at abc.net.au/radionational you'll find some lovely pictures of a recently excavated ancient basilica, the Sanctuary of Lot's Cave, on the Jordan side of the Dead Sea, where my next guest has been digging for over 25 years. Konstantinos Politis knows it takes time to do his work properly. But one thing is clear, it's not just modern people who've searched for the remains of the Bible's stories in the desert sands, but the ancients did too, as you'll hear.

Konstantinos Politis, it's wonderful to have you on The Spirit of Things.

Konstantinos Politis: Thank you.

Rachael Kohn: You are an archaeologist with a very broad reach, are you not?

Konstantinos Politis: Well, I began working in Europe, in Greece, which is where I'm from, but I've spent the last 25 or more years in the Levant, the Holy Land, particularly in Jordan and Syria.

Rachael Kohn: Well, Syria is a site right now where there is a lot of civil conflict. So what kind of impact does that have on the sacred archaeological sites?

Konstantinos Politis: Well, that part of the world has always had conflict, and unfortunately it's continuing today. Often the sites are damaged because of war. We know this of course from Iraq particularly.

Rachael Kohn: Yes. Well, the site that you are famous for, very well connected with for over 25 years or so, is called the Sanctuary of Lot. That site was sort of damaged before you got to it, but not through conflict, through enterprise one might say.

Konstantinos Politis: I began working in that area, the south-east end of the Dead Sea (which is, by the way, the lowest place on Earth) in the late 1980s on a survey, and there are many archaeological sites that came up. But that area was being developed by the Jordanian government, and a lot of the development was underground irrigation systems, so consequently they came across a lot of archaeology. There were European water engineers and there was a European company in fact who participated unfortunately in some of the damaging of the sites. We were lucky enough to have discovered this site and excavated it and have now protected it.

Rachael Kohn: Before that happened, I imagine a place like that would be looted, people would be interested in perhaps selling some of the items that were found on the market. Did that happen prior to your discovery on site?

Konstantinos Politis: It was unfortunately the European interest in antiquities and ancient sites that drew attention to the local people that what they had beneath their poor agricultural fields and poor houses were actually sellable antiquities. So, not before we went there, but once engineers and people in development came across these, before that they weren't conscious of it. We of course tried to excavate and protect the stuff as archaeologists as much as possible, and unfortunately it was an ongoing problem, which is almost solved today.

Rachael Kohn: What made you think that this could be the location of the Sanctuary of Lot?

Konstantinos Politis: Initially we weren't looking for the Sanctuary of Lot, or any particular site. We went into the field looking for interesting archaeological sites. This one had a lot of material on the surface which alluded to the fact that it was probably something of importance. But when we began to find architectural pieces and mosaics and eventually inscriptions which mentioned Lot of the Old Testament in Genesis 19, then we looked at some historical sources, particularly the very famous map in Madaba, 6th century early Christian map, which locates about 150 sites in the Holy Land, particularly Jerusalem and what is now Jordan and Israel.

Rachael Kohn: Where is Madaba?

Konstantinos Politis: Madaba is located just east of the Dead Sea in modern Jordan on the plateau. It's a small town, originally settled by Christians, but it had a number of early Christian churches, and in one of these they accidentally discovered this old map, which we call the Madaba map. But it's a floor map made of small mosaic cubes.

Rachael Kohn: The story of Lot who flees from Sodom with his daughters, he goes to a town called Zoar.

Konstantinos Politis: Yes, as it is recounted in Genesis 19 of the Old Testament, there's the destruction of Sodom which is supposed to be an evil place according to the Old Testament, and Lot is the only righteous, good man. He escapes with his family to this small town of Zoar, which actually in Aramaic, old Hebrew, 'Zoar' means 'the small place'. For some reason he didn't like it and went and lived in a cave with his daughters. By that time his wife had turned into a pillar of salt, as you may know. And there he lived as a holy man, presumably.

Rachael Kohn: The map of Madaba actually has the name 'Zoar' on it, does it not, so it actually locates the place.

Konstantinos Politis: Yes, on this Madaba map you have the Sanctuary of Lot, which is a small church built over the Cave of Lot, and just below it on the plateau is Zoar. So Zoar is also located on this map and it's actually where we are working right now on a new project, so we continue work in the area.

Rachael Kohn: So that map actually shows (I saw the fragment of it) a church already, a kind of a basilica with three columns.

Konstantinos Politis: The map shows what is probably on a little hill a small church which is the Sanctuary of Lot. Below it is a town with a fortress, there are three towers around it, and then date palms around it, and there's an entranceway to this fortified town. We know about Zoar also from historical passages as being a very important agricultural place for dates, for indigo, and later for sugar.

Rachael Kohn: So, a very important trade route I imagine.

Konstantinos Politis: It was a relatively important agricultural town, which is where a lot of its wealth has come from, and I surmised it is all the way back to the Old Testament period of the iron age, the period of the Moabites who have large agricultural settlements. So it continues through the Roman early Christian and even Islamic periods being a relatively wealthy agricultural town.

Rachael Kohn: When you decided that this was definitely the place to excavate further, who provided the funds for this very expensive ordeal, which I imagine you thought was going to take many years?

Konstantinos Politis: Yes, initially and specifically for the monastery sanctuary of Lot, Lot's Cave site, the British Museum was our principal sponsor, which is where I was working for a couple of decades. And we continued some work, but more recently we have received support for the site of Zoar both from the local Jordanian sources but also from European and Greek sources.

Rachael Kohn: Is that the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology?

Konstantinos Politis: At one point there were various institutions that have helped, but the Greek Ministry and actually the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs have helped at some point. We've had private sponsorship. It's more difficult to get support now for archaeology than it was in the past. In the past the British Museum pretty much paid for the monastery of Lot excavation. For the new project at Zoar it's more difficult, and we have to get the bits and pieces from whoever we can.

Rachael Kohn: And why is that? Is it politically sensitive or is it just a lack of funds?

Konstantinos Politis: No, on the contrary, people are interested in developing the area for tourism, but also there's more interest in the area than there ever was, but there is just simply less money all around. In academia, in the West, in Europe and America there is less money to sponsor projects, so we have to go to other ways of trying to sponsor our work.

Rachael Kohn: Konstantinos, what were you expecting to find? A church, a monastery, a hermitage? Did you know exactly what sort of building you were going to uncover?

Konstantinos Politis: From the first days when we were on the site of Lot's Cave we could see little pieces of broken glass, metal, but even more telling, small cubes of stone, which is what mosaic floors are made of. So there was obviously...we thought there was going to be a mosaic floor. The location of the site—on a cliff—made it very unusual for it to be a normal settlement or even a Roman fort, let's say, so it began from the very beginning to be a very curious site, a site that would have had interest. It took us several years though until we actually uncovered in situ mosaic floors, and finally in 1992 the cave itself, which is dedicated to Lot's family.

Rachael Kohn: Yes. Tell me about those mosaics? Do they tell a story? Are there images on them or are they purely design?

Konstantinos Politis: There are seven mosaic pavements in this church and we're very lucky to actually have dates and names, dates of 572 AD, 605 AD, and even 692 AD, which is in the early Islamic period. So the church is continuing, Christians are continuing, it seems that there is a peaceful coexistence, in the beginning at least, with Islam. It also names various bishops, the abbot of the monastery, even the local governor. The language is in Byzantine Greek and most of the names are Greek names, but there are several local Aramaic names, translated into Greek, but it's interesting that there are local people, again, using the Greek language which is the language of the New Testament, early Christianity, but there certainly is a strong element of local Aramaic-speaking population.

Rachael Kohn: So there are names, there are dates. Are there any pictures?

Konstantinos Politis: Yes, there are typical rondels with grapevines and animals, birds, which are very typical early Christian motifs, but there are also geometric patterns. Nothing very unusual as far as the iconography is concerned, and no evidence that there was a destruction of icons, because in the 7th century some mosaics and certainly icons in certain places, like St Catherine's in the Sinai, were prohibited, you weren't supposed to show the image certainly of your God, but any image. And this is coming from Judaism but also Islam and also the early religions in Arabia were against the portrayal of the image.

Rachael Kohn: It's interesting because synagogues from that time do have lots of images, so I wonder if there is more a prohibition coming from Islam.

Konstantinos Politis: Very strictly speaking, the prohibition of image is coming from Judaism and from the Old Testament. If there are images on synagogues of the Byzantine period, probably they're being influenced by the Christians or even the Hellenistic Greeks who did influence Jews of the area quite a lot. But the local belief, whether it's Jews or Arabs of the Nabataean world of Petra, did not believe in the image. This is why you have un-iconical images, blocks for instance, in Petra, and these are supposed to be the gods. So Islam does affect later probably, but I think there just is a very basic belief against the icon in Semitic people, whether they are Jews or Arabs.

Rachael Kohn: So, no chance of getting a mosaic portrait of Lot.

Konstantinos Politis: No, not on this site, but there are other sites that have portraits of humans in the period, but not of Lot himself, no.

Rachael Kohn: The photographs of these excavations are really ghostly and beautiful. You have this sense of a beautiful church with a nave and alcoves emerging out of the soil, so delicate and so sensitive. I imagine it must have been extraordinary to try to preserve those mosaics and put them back, reassemble them in order.

Konstantinos Politis: We had a program of consolidating all the walls, and carefully consolidating and in one case restoring one of the mosaics which was tumbling down the hill. This project is ongoing and actually it's sponsored by the Greek Ministry of Culture. Despite the problems in Greece, we've managed to get some support. There is also an on-site museum in which we've put many of the finds, and one of those mosaics is now on display. So conservation is a very important element in any archaeological discovery, so we can preserve it for future generations. And this is the case in this site.

Rachael Kohn: Dr. Konstantinos Politis, talking about his most important discovery, the Sanctuary of Lot's Cave in Jordan and the adjacent excavations in Biblical Zoar. He was the guest of Macquarie University's Society for the Study of Early Christianity. Have a look at Dr Politis on site with some of his discoveries at The Spirit of Things website at abc.net.au/radionational.

Well, when the church was finally revealed, did it become re-sacralised, re-sanctified by the Greek Orthodox Church?

Konstantinos Politis: When we relayed one of the mosaics, conserved and relayed it, we had a blessing ceremony, and the Bishop of Philadelphia, which is modern Amman, came and we had a nice ceremony with the ministers and various officials, ambassadors. So we had a blessing of the site, but you can't really re-consecrate the site unless it belongs to some church. And it belongs to the Jordan government and technically the Antiquities Department and the Ministry of Religion, but it's not a consecrated church, it's a tourist site.

Rachael Kohn: I suppose these sites all have to be tourist sites if they're going to raise the revenue that would provide the means of protecting them in the fashion that you as an archaeologist would want.

Konstantinos Politis: Yes, tourism is seen as a way of bringing in funds to protect archaeological sites in Jordan and other countries, which is why many countries now have ministries of tourism and antiquities. In the past it may have been in ministries of culture. This is a bureaucratic strategy. It may or may not work. I hope it does bring funds, which are badly needed, not just to excavate sites but to actually protect them in the long run. So yes, tourism I think is a blessing, but it might be a mixed blessing too.

Rachael Kohn: I imagine this museum would have a lot of multimedia presentations, and I'd like to ask you what the role of the multimedia technology has been in even the research and presentation of what you found there.

Konstantinos Politis: We have always tried, even when we were excavating the site, to have it open to the local community as well as tourists. When we began to work on the conservation of mosaics particularly we actually produced a film called Mosaic (funny!) and it's now being shown in a museum. The educational part of all archaeological sites, and specifically this one, was certainly something we had in mind. So we have two small productions, as I said, one in conservation mosaic and one a general one in Lot's Cave, and it's something which is ongoing and you should have of course multimedia productions. But the whole idea of outreach to the public is very important, for tourism but also for the local people to understand and protect the sites, because this is probably the best way of protecting the sites from local looting, is actually having them understand and appreciate the sites.

Rachael Kohn: Is it just looting or are there other issues about the sensitivity of the Christian site in a Muslim country? Religious sites in the Middle East have been sensitive, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, all claiming some connection to it. Sometimes they've been vandalised. Is that a concern?

Konstantinos Politis: From my experience the damage that has happened on archaeological sites in Jordan and perhaps generally is specifically because people are hungry and they need to make some money. I haven't had the experience of them damaging, at least not our site in Jordan, for religious or political reasons, on the contrary, the local people are protecting it quite a lot now because they feel it is part of their heritage, which it is. In Islam, the people of the book, which are the people of the Old Testament and the New Testament, are venerated, and this is how Islam correctly should be portrayed.

Rachael Kohn: It's interesting though, because during the time when the site was really active, this was a time of church councils, the third Council of Constantinople I think was very concerned with heresy and also with the threat of Islam, perhaps around the time of the demise of the site, I'm not sure, I'd like you to answer that…

Konstantinos Politis: The 7th century, yes. As an archaeologist, and I can speak on behalf actually of other archaeologists too, in Jordan at least, there is not one single case of a church being destroyed in early Islam, on the contrary, they were being rebuilt. Some, such as the site of Mefaat, Umm ar-Rasas, on a very grand scale, as late as the 8th century AD. So Christians are doing well under early Islam and they are paying for and building churches. So we don't have this destruction, these attacks.

Rachael Kohn: Do you think it's a cooptation or a claiming of the Christian tradition under the umbrella of Islam? Jesus as a prophet, Lot as a prophet, et cetera?

Konstantinos Politis: Certainly Lot, Nabi, he's a prophet, and certainly Jesus, Esa, and all the Old Testament and Christian figures are prophets in Islam. But looking at the associated economy of early Islam, primarily 7th and early 8th century, they needed the Christian population. They were clever, they didn't massacre them, they needed them to build this new empire, the Islamic world, they needed them to build on it. So they employed Christians in every sense, they employed them to build mosques, to make mosaics. And of course they tried to entice them by giving them complete tax breaks if you become a Muslim, but they didn't force them and they didn't destroy churches. So there were other tactful ways of trying to lure them into Islam, but not by force, not at least the way we see it.

Rachael Kohn: What is your explanation, then, of the demise of that site? There was a time when it ceased to be inhabited. Why do you think?

Konstantinos Politis: A traditional interpretation has been that by around 750 AD, mid 8th century, there was a revolution in the early Islamic world, the Abbasid family, which came from Jordan also, overthrew the Umayyad based in Damascus and literally massacred almost all of them, including the children. The only ones that escaped ended up in Spain. But in the near East they had this quite bloody revolution, and even razed a lot of their early Islamic monuments.

This new Abbasid revolution, around 750 as I said, was based now in Baghdad, a new city, and the whole economic, socio-sphere of influence, not just in terms of activity, moved away from the Levant—Syria, Palestine, Jordan—and moved away farther east to Baghdad, and these areas became less favoured. So it seems from the archaeological record that there was an abandonment. Trade routes were cut. The Byzantine world was also cut away. The Christians may have very well left. There was also plague in the east Mediterranean at the time, possibly also bad weather conditions. A number of these political and environmental factors obviously seemed to have contributed to a large abandonment, but not complete, certainly of the southern Levant.

Rachael Kohn: That leads me to the burial ground. That's an area rich with tombstones and probably lots of inscriptions, but not really excavated, although I imagine some have been identified. First of all, why hasn't it been excavated? Burial grounds are such a rich repository of information. But secondly, what sort of inscriptions have been found?

Konstantinos Politis: The cemetery at Zoar, modern Safi, came up accidentally through the modern irrigation canals that were being made by these European and Jordanian companies. They unfortunately were not allotted to the archaeological areas that were to be protected. Consequently many of the teams, if not most of them, were damaged, and then as soon as the Europeans found this interest in antiquities the locals began to particularly rob the tombs. So, many of the tombstones and the items in them, which we know were at least pottery, glass vessels, and even gold jewellery, were looted and sold.

Fortunately the tombstones themselves, because of the large size and weight of them, could not be transported very easily, so we began a campaign, in collaboration with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, to collect many of these, and we have now over 400, and they are the best collection of inscriptions that we know of in the east Mediterranean for the late antique 4th to 7th centuries AD. They give us a lot of information about the names of the people of course. Many of the names are Greek, some Latin, but also many Aramaic and local Nabataean names, all written in Greek. They're largely Christian, 10% are actually Jewish Aramaic, so there was a Jewish community that survives there and they used the destruction of the temple in 70 AD as their dating method. The Greek Christian inscriptions use the old Hellenistic Macedonian Greek dating methods.

So we have a lot of information we can get about the people, their occupations, their names, their ethnic origins, and even international relations. We have people who have come from Petra, from the Sea of Galilee, who have died there. So these are now fully published for anyone who's interested, but it gives a wealth of information. We continue to excavate there and hopefully we will be able to get some more in situ material, but for the moment it's largely from robbed out material.

Rachael Kohn: It sounds fantastic. And is the museum now completed, or is it going to be completed sometime soon?

Konstantinos Politis: No, the museum is fully built, it's operational, there are antiquities with labels and panels completely ready. It should be open. There is an administrative problem which is a problem you often get in many countries where you can get money to build a building and set up an exhibition, we set up the exhibition with help from the British Museum, but the staff needs training. So it's a technical issue. There are some staff but they need some proper training in proper administration before they open the doors. Having said that, they should open the doors any minute, any day.

Rachael Kohn: It sounds exciting, and I certainly hope I get there. Konstantinos Politis, thank you so much for being on The Spirit of Things. Just tell me, are you continuing to excavate the spot at the Sanctuary of Lot?

Konstantinos Politis: The Sanctuary of Lot is complete and we're hoping to build a shelter over the mosaic so you can also see them. My work is continuing in the town of Zoar just below it, and we're working on the Byzantine period, but primarily we're focusing on the agricultural activity during the mediaeval period, focusing on the sugar and indigo trade, which was very important. In fact it was known to be the centre for sugar industry during the mediaeval period, a technology which was later transferred to the Mediterranean and Europe and eventually the Americans.

Rachael Kohn: All the best with that. Thank you so much for being on The Spirit of Things.

Konstantinos Politis: Thank you for inviting me.

Rachael Kohn: Konstantinos Politis told me afterward that while an ABC TV crew were filming him, they accidentally caught tomb robbers red handed. That led to the dismissal of a government official whose job it was to prevent that sort of thing. So, the media can be useful after all! Dr Politis is currently director of the Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Studies in Greece.

Have a look at the pictures on our website by going to abc.net.au/radionational and scroll down to The Spirit of Things.

The program was produced by me and Geoff Wood and sound engineering today was by Paul Gough.

Next week, what is at stake if the Catholic Church doesn't move with the times? Two highly accomplished Catholic thinkers and servants of the Church, visiting here from America, provide some startling answers, and they find support for the ordination of women, for example, in the Church's tradition itself. Don't miss Brother Louis and Phyllis Zagano next week on The Spirit of Things, with me Rachael Kohn.

Guests

Dr. Konstantinos Politis

Currently Director of the Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Studies in Greece. He is an archaeologist working on early Christianity and early Islam in Jordan and Syria. He previously worked in the Department of Later and Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum, London, where he has lived for 30 years.

Credits

Presenter

Dr Rachael Kohn

Producer

Dr Rachael Kohn / Geoff Wood

Comments (4)

Evan Hadkins :

paul leonard hill :

29 May 2012 10:38:37am

Readers of the NT will know that in none of the sightings of Jesus after his death was he at first recognised by his disciples. I would suggest that the reason for this was that the person was NOT Jesus but one or both of the following. The disciples were in a very frightened state as they too were fearful of arrest and crucifixion and thus hypersuggestable. Clutching at straws at being leaderless they felt extremely vulnerable and desperate for Jesus to be risen. Thus the individual who they 'recognised' as being Jesus, frightened of their hysteria, went along with the role until he could escape. The other, more probable reason is that the 'recognised' individual was in fact a Jesus look alike actor set up by the Romans to get the disciples to lead them back to their hiding place so that everyone there could be arrested as suspected insurgents 'terrorists'. Many people, even Romans, believed that people could be resurrected but didn't look exactly like their former selves. A clue here is when 'Jesus' said “Touch me not for I have not yet received my mortal body.” knowing that if anyone got that close and maybe hugged him they would realise that it was NOT him. The very last thing that the Romans would have wanted was a funeral cortage on the Day of the Passover, the day of Jewish ultra nationalism when tempers would have been at their hottest, with the possibility of riots that could have escalated out of control and even spread to other parts of the Empire. So they stole his body from the tomb and disposed of it. Jesus was primarily executed because they feared that he would lead such an insurrection, having planned it well before. The reason that he was whipped and bashed before being executed was to force him to reveal the whereabouts of the other disciples who had gone into hiding as there could be one or more alternate leaders among them. This was what Judas was most terrified of, hence swapping sides to curry favour with the Romans when he lost his leadership challenge at the Last Supper which was held in a secret location. There was reason for this suspicion by the Romans as Jesus's Party was a Provisional Govt with a military wing as well as political. Simon the Zealot, who cut off the ear of a Roman soldier at Jesus arrest, was an example. This militarism was not something that Jesus wanted but what he inherited from his step father Joseph. Jesus, as peacemaker, was trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement between ALL of the insurgent groups and the Romans with a Roman withdrawal to follow and no barriers to trade along the Silk Road.Judas had other plans, with Jesus to be the bait to draw all of the Jewish leaders into a trap by coming to his trial to judge him. His rebels would surround the Little Sanhedrin, capture it and execute all of the leaders whilst Jesus would 'accidently' be killed. Pilate and other Roman leaders would be executed simultaneously. A classic coup d'etat of the time. Jesus said “N

paul leonard hill :

02 Jun 2012 3:06:38pm

The New Testament was put together by one Bishop Arrenius of Rome in the 4th century AD. He was commissioned by Constantine who was about to, or already had, made himself both Emperor and Pope. Monarch and High Priest. Thus the NT was in every sense of the word his political and theological constitution which gave him unlimited power in both senses, a military sense to coerce his subjects physically but also in a theological sense to coerce them spiritually. That is threaten them with excommunication and eternal damnation if they were not obedient to the Church and therefore to him. Thus a resurrected Christ was mandatory to his power as well as for his own personal salvation a very important reason for his lust for power. What did Constantine have on his conscience? What had he done to gain such power?

He would be the vicar, the sole vicar, of Jesus Christ on Earth so that ultimately all communications to Jesus and, by definition, the Father via the Holy Ghost. The Trinity was also presumably a concoction of Constantine as that too was mandatory to ultimate power, (in his subject's interest of course). His subjects paying tithes to the Church was mandatory for salvation thus guaranteeing a good cash flow to build the physical power structure. Thus without Jesus having been resurrected from the dead Constantine's power was limited to physical coercion, difficult when the military becomes divided and turns on itself, sides with the people etc. during an uprising. Torture AND Hell.

From my readings there was very little idea of a resurrected Jesus before Constantine, especially among the Nazarene Church's which moved to the East. However, there were thousands of documents to choose from portraying Jesus as every sort of individual imaginable, socialist, conservative, anarchist, homosexual etc. each one to justify the belief systems of the sect from which they came. Those that concentrated on a resurrected Jesus were obviously chosen and their major promulgator was Paul, 13 books by Paul who had a Helluva lot on HIS conscience, literally, having been the inquisitor working for the Romans and thus responsible for the death of thousands of Christian 'terrorists'. 'Who can rescue me from this body of death, oh wretched man that I am. All my righteousnesses are but as filthy rags.' Hardly the outbursts of a man at peace with himself.

How many words written by Jesus in the NT. NOT ONE SINGLE ONE. A bit odd considering that, being groomed for Monarch, he must have been literate, speaking 3 languages at least, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. I suspect that what he had to say would have totally contradicted Paul and have been considered by both Jews of all sects and the Romans who said that even Caligula was God was considered blasphemous in the extreme and thus burned. He said 'Love thy neighbor as thyself' as a damn good idea, not a commandment as he didn't believe in pushing people around at all.

Byron :

15 May 2013 12:50:33am

Rachel, you had me until the anti-Catholic nonsense at the end about moving with the times. These times are violent, shallow and sex-obsessed. My RC Church stands against that and I'm deeply thankful. BTW, most Catholics are now in the developing world and they're conservative, not like the liberal and dying West.